Retail Branding

Retail branding is a strategy for building a strong perception of your store in your customers’ minds. It’s the deliberate steps you take to evoke positive feelings and encourage customers to see your retail business in a certain way.

Generally, a brand is an identity: the story you tell customers to connect with them.

The brand is the aspiration the customer wants to buy—it’s the core truth of the brand. Your brand is a story you tell to the world with the hope it will resonate and consumers will want to associate themselves with it.

Retail branding vs. product branding
It can be easy to confuse store branding with product branding. But where the former creates a perception of your entire store, the latter focuses on the look and feel of a particular product.

Retail branding targets a main market. But product branding goes deeper, targeting a specific submarket within the main target audience.

One thing to bear in mind: Although product and retail branding are different, the former falls under the umbrella of overall store branding.

Consider the McDonald’s example. Although the Happy Meal targets a submarket, the product’s visual identity (the signature red and yellow colors and fonts) are the same as the main brand.

Product branding has to follow the same visual brand identity so products don’t clash with each other and customers can still recognize them as part of your brand.